Posts Tagged ‘jobs’

23,000 people in Maine are jobless and looking for work, but Governor Paul LePage’s wife wants a cute new car, so she is working as a waitress in scenic Boothbay Harbor during the lucrative summer tourist season. While Mrs. LePage is serving lobster nachos and double-wrapped bacon scallops, Governor LePage is trying to eliminate the food stamp benefits of his poorest constituents.

Good news: The official unemployment rate is:5.8%. 214,000 new jobs were added to the workforce last month, 2.3 million so far this year.

Not-So-Good News: The real unemployment rate is 11.1% (U6, includes people who no longer get unemployment benefits, need work but have stopped looking because it’s futile, or have only found part-time work). Learn more here.

Bad News:Wages for those new jobs are low. Very low, down where they were in 2009. And 2.9 million people have been out of work for half a year or more.

“More than 1 million Americans are bracing for a harrowing, post-Christmas jolt as extended federal unemployment benefits come to a sudden halt this weekend, with potentially significant implications for the recovering U.S. economy. A tense political battle likely looms when Congress reconvenes in the new, midterm election year.”

The Civil Rights demonstration on August 28, 1963 was called the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Jobs came first, since the right to vote means little without job opportunity and a living wage. The event, produced in 8 weeks, had really been 22 years in the making. A. Philip Randolph of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters planned such a march for equal employment opportunity in 1941, and was only dissuaded when President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, banning job discrimination in the World War II defense industries.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics announced employment figures for April 2013: 165,000 new jobs. No one knows exactly what that means, but one thing is certain: This number will certainly change. Does that indicate government ineptitude or political manipulation? No.

U.S. jobs grew by only 88,000 in March, less than half of recent monthly job increases, yet the unemployment rate was the lowest in four years, 7.6 percent. How come? People stopped looking, went back to school, or were otherwise no longer counted as unemployed. Was job growth a victim of austerity anticipation? Opinions differ.

The December 2011 employment figures are out, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that last month saw an increase of 200,000 new jobs. At that rate it will be a mere 65 months before we get to full employment.

The BLS adjusts these statistics to account for seasonal variations so that temporary holiday jobs — evergreen salesmen, reindeer renters, maids-a-milking, department store Santas — don’t distort the figures. Some analysts aren’t sure the Bureau understands our 21st century retail supply chain, where orders on the InterWebz make temporary work for thousands of migratory warehouse gypsies and delivery drivers. Stay tuned for next month’s job numbers.

“Around 800,000 veterans are jobless, 1.4m live below the poverty line, and one in every three homeless adult men in America is a veteran. Though the overall unemployment rate among America’s 21m veterans in November (7.4%) was lower than the national rate (8.6%), for veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan it was 11.1%. And for veterans between the ages of 18 and 24, it was a staggering 37.9%, up from 30.4% just a month earlier.”

“Whatever the cause, this bleak trend is occurring as the last American troops leave Iraq at the end of this year, and as more than 1m new veterans are expected to join the civilian labour force over the next four years.”

“There are 6.6 million fewer jobs in the United States than there were four years ago. Some 23 million Americans who would like to work full-time cannot get a job. Almost half of those who are unemployed have been unemployed long-term. Wages are falling—the real income of a typical American household is now below the level it was in 1997.”